Chores
by Whilom
Summary: Jess had filled in the details, but Dean had built the foundation.


**Chores** - Whilom

The hardest part in getting over Jess's death was forgetting how she infiltrated the little things.

Cooking dinner was bad—he'd considered attempting it but one of the diners he and Dean had stopped in had given him a glimpse of a row of copper pans, and that had been the end of that. Jess had always marveled at the way he could flip a perfect omelet. Hers had always ended up on the floor. _Hunting_, his brain had easily supplied before he quickly said, "Must've been all that juggling I practiced as a kid."

He had never juggled in his life. Dean had, once, when they were little. He'd come to the motel with three small red balls and told Sam he'd have a surprise tonight. After Sam had been good all day, stirring the mac-n-cheese and getting a bath without complaining, he'd been shuffled onto the moth-eaten couch and treated to a magic show, filled with sparkling eyes and flying red spheres and loose quarters appearing out of his ear with a snap. John had come home, tired and dirty, and one gruff command from him had wiped the smiles from their faces, sent Dean running for bandages and sent Sam to bed. Sam found the three balls in the trash before they left.

"Dean!" he called. "Dean, your magic tricks—"

"Leave 'em, Sam."

Dean hadn't looked at him, but his jaw had bunched in the way that said Dean was ashamed of himself, had been caught being a kid again and was determined not to let the failure happen twice. Sam sat in the backseat of the Impala in rare silence that trip, his brow furrowed at the thought of those little red balls and what they'd done wrong.

00000

Laundry was worse. Jess's shriek had him barreling into the bedroom, eyes already searching for a weapon, and he almost wrung her neck with shaking hands when he saw her dismayed face at the pile of pink laundry lying on the bed. "You separate colors from whites, Sam," she'd chided him and done silly dances in her newly pink underwear every morning. He'd never been able to look at the color pink without a big grin on his face after that.

They'd never separated colors from whites when he was a kid. Dean had always shoved the clothes into the machine with a different set of criteria. Mud and blood. Jeans and shirts. Really old or recently worn. A lot of soap or a little. Whether you could bleach the stains away or you couldn't. Sam had solemnly helped him, measured detergent with a careful hand, folded and rolled whenever the dryer pinged. When John wasn't looking, he would bury his face in the warm pile of clean flannel and breathe deep. The corners of Dean's mouth tugged whenever he did this, and he never complained that Sam was shirking his share of the work in favor of enjoying the fruits of Dean's labor.

00000

Cleaning was worst. The smell of lemon- and pine-scented cleaners filled the apartment when Sam came in late from studying at the library and Jess's hair was pulled back, a dirty rag dangling from her hand. Everything smelled invigorating, looked different—Jess liked to rearrange things when she cleaned—and the heady feeling of newness, of sweeping back the dirt and reclaiming their life from the dust, always got to Sam's head. Jess thought he was kind of crazy for it, it was a Sam-thing, but she let him praise her good work and poke around the apartment with a small smile on his face, sniffing appreciatively at the air and swiping the bookshelves with a finger.

He'd once tried to explain that this kind of cleaning was new to him, but to explain meant telling Jess what kind of images came up when he heard the word "cleaning," and he wasn't ready to go there. He didn't want to tell her that, to him, _cleaning _meant clenched teeth and clamped fingers, long strips of white bandages and pieces of black thread. Cleaning meant _Help me hold him_, and _Thank God there's no infection_, and _Just a little more, I've almost got it_. Cleaning was covering up their tracks, blazing out of town when Social Services came too close, hearing the buzz of fear in the air as John snapped orders and Dean kept a tight grip on Sam's jacket when he wasn't kicking out fires or wiping down their prints.

So whenever Jessica pulled up her hair and dragged the mop out of the closet, Sam grinned and promised to stay out of her way. He usually walked to the nearest pharmacy, restocked their overflowing First Aid kit with bandages they never used and browsed the antiseptic with a practiced eye. She never asked why he sometimes came back from those errands with confusion in his eyes at the Pine-Sol smell and tucked away the curved needle and thread to be forgotten in his pocket. And she never protested when he stalked across the just-mopped floor to pull her to him and breathe deep.

00000

Getting over Jess was hard because she invaded every crevice of his fortress, wound herself like a vine over every wall. But when the vine had burned away, the wall was still there, charred but standing. He was still firm on his foundation. Sam shuddered to think what would have happened to him if it wasn't the vine that was lost, but the rock on which the wall was built.

He hadn't forgotten that Dean had taught him first.


End file.
